NBCSN is showing a few Big Bash League games this season live (read: middle of the night in North America). I woulda never followed the BBL; if do bother being up at weird hours to watch Twenty20 it’s usually the Indian Premier League. But I feel like it’s my patriotic duty to support cricket in the U.S. I heard Melbourne was kind of like San Francisco and the Renegades have Trinis Dwayne Bravo and Sunil Narine, so I think I’ve found my team.

Watching England vs. West Indies now. As any baseball aficionado knows, things like lowering the mound or moving in the fences takes what is, indeed, one of the central spectacles of baseball, and cheapens it. How great is a home run if you’re virtually guaranteed several, from each team, each game? Does more home runs really equal more “excitement” and more spectators? or how long does it take for audiences to become inured to this steady stream of vuelacercas? But I think baseball aficionados are the only ones who would be early adopters of cricket in the U.S. Really? You’re going to get fans of the NBA or the NFL to sit still for even 40 overs? No matter how many sixes they smash into the stands (“you mean we have to give the ball back?”) I don’t think you’re going to attract fans from more action-packed sports. In fact, you destroy perhaps cricket’s one selling point which was its original downfall: its elitism. People who like baseball, golf, tennis could get into another British sport, which could be extolled for its perceived gentlemanly virtues: An elegant game for a more civilized age.

I do occasionally post linguistic stuff here, when it comes up in the course of my travels (foreigners talk funny!) but a recent Language Log comment thread is also relevant to American cricket, as well as, my other love, baseball:

Rounders was played by boys and (far worse!) girls. The only adults who played it were strictly working class. So naturally the identification of baseball with rounders annoyed the Americans tremendously, and an ideology arose rejecting any English origin of baseball as unpatriotic. Enter Abner Doubleday…

Yes, baseball and rounders are both different codifications of a popular kind of rural game played in the southeast corner of England in early modern times. There are, or were, others, such as stoolball—which we played at school in the 1960s—and bat and trap, now almost extinct. Cricket comes from the same family tree, but diverged longer ago. They are all native to Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Hampshire.

It’s in the sidebar links, but, really, who looks at/goes to those, anyway? Anyway, if you wanna watch the games this weekend (and maybe catch a glimpse of yours truly!) they’ll be shown on ESPN3.com, carried by certain ISPs.